So I am fairly new to working with a game engine, I just started learning programming and scripting and I love it so far. I recently came across Gang Beasts and I was happy it was made in Unity since I am myself using Unity. I was wondering though, is this kind of game only restricted to be built with Unity or can it be also built and played the exact same way if you use Unreal Engine 4 or a different game engine. I tried researching myself and all I found were video which compare how games look a little different in each engine but not too much on what kind of product can or cannot come out of a certain engine.
Could you build Gang Beasts with Unreal Engine 4?
Will it play the same? Does it have all the necessary tools for such a game?
I can’t imagine that it doesn’t, I mean every engine looks very robust and they might specialize in certain genre but I think every engine has the capability to let the user build any game. Question is, which one is better? I am not an Unreal Engine 4 user who came here just to ask a question and leave, I really use Unity and not planning to switch to anything else anytime soon, but I was just curious, I hope it’s okay to ask here, I don’t suppose anyone here is NOT aware that other game engines exist so I don’t see how that is illegal to ask, if it is, I apologize.
I also wanted to know more about how to make this style of games. Is it necessary to know how to paint and animate or even do math in order to create the formulas for the body parts to move like that? Do people use some ready made physics controls as a plugin or something? Sorry I am totally new to all of this and don’t know what kind of knowledge is required in order to even start building something like that.
I can see that a lot of the stuff made today is in Engines which let you drag and drop objects and easily tell them what to do and how to move but I am sure there is a limit to that and at some point you probably need to know how to draw/animate and understand complicated mathematical formulas and physics . Please help me out so I can get started on my journey haha. I keep researching and learning myself but any help from you will be greatly appreciated and will help accelerate the process.
Thank you very much. Any chance you can direct me to a certain set of tutorials on what I need to learn to build this with Unity? Here is a a gameplay video:
There will be no tutorial that will teach you how to build this specific game. However, individual tutorials will teach you how to build the necessary pieces from which this game could be built.
Most of the core concepts necessary to create a game are universal to all games. Learning them can be done through the official learning section. Very common game mechanics will occasionally have tutorials but only rarely will you find advanced tutorials and even then only for common topics like voxels.
Thank you very much, I am aware of those tutorials though. I was asking, out of ALL of those tutorials which were the main one I need to know for this kind of game but I guess you need to know everything.
Still, will you be able to recommend to focus on something to create games like Gang Beasts? I know I sound like another guy who saw a game and thinks he can make the same thing or better in a week but I don’t. I just want to know which direction to take to go towards that kind of genre. If it’s just “learn everything” then fair enough I will
Thank you both very much, I appreciate the prompt response!
Initially game development does require you to learn as much as you can but once you’ve learned the basics you’ll be focusing more on solving problems. Basically this is a repeating process of taking problems you want to solve (such as one character throwing another), breaking it down into the simplest steps you can, and implementing those steps.
By the way games are mostly about smoke and mirrors. What the player sees the game doing may be completely different than what it is actually doing under the hood and the complexity of the developer’s solution may be way different too.
If you have previous programming experience, you can skip most tutorials, go to unity manual + scripting reference and read them instead.
If you have no previous experience, then I you won’t be able to just cleverly select the absolute bare minimum you should cover via tutorials.
Basically, if you want to reduce learning time, you’ll probably need some sort of a tutor. If you don’t have a tutor, then you will need to devour all the information you come across and then see if it is relevant or something you already know.
Really you need the ones appropriate to whatever task you are doing. Grab the scripting ones when you are scripting. The animation ones when you are animating. And so on.
By the end of your project you will need to know everything in all of the tutorials. The only ones you won’t need are the complete project ones. These are designed to give you a broad overview rather then to teach you anything specific.
Paradoxically the best ones to start with are the complete project ones.
This made it a lot clearer, thank you so much for taking the time to explain it further. Makes a lot of sense actually.
I am not one to look for shortcuts, I like to take a realistic approach for everything I do. I am a music producer and I learned everything on my own, fairly quickly too. With my sound design knowledge I will save time and money and be able to design my own soundtracks and anything sound related for my applications. It will be fun to create the soundtrack of my own game. I tried learning programming a few years ago and it was beyond difficult but I think I wasn’t ready. My main problem wasn’t understanding the code but being able to re-write it once the professor erased it from the board. Then again, if you truly understand something, you could redo it. I hope you know what I mean though. The questions I asked might look silly but I generally wanted a direction. For example, if you asked me where to start if you want to be a music producer, I would recommend you train your musical hearing first and obtain information on the latest trends in music and then just start making it, no rules, just make a simple beat and add a synth and then mix it until it sounds good and you can use tutorials that will teach you how to mix. I would direct you right away learning a DAW and then finding sounds that work together. Learning the structure of a track. I guess the same question for programming and game design has a completely different answer. Thank you once again for clearing things up for me. I am currently in a college program for Networking and it introduces you to Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Rogers and Sun frameworks. teaching you how to be a technical specialist in any computer support, local area network administration and internet management environment. I am also taking some programming courses this year. C is the first one. I am also learning Databases in Python and MySQL. I got really off topic but once again thanks for the help and if you got anything else to say, I will be glad to learn more!
Makes sense. You know, I actually got some complete projects for Unity and been dissecting them. I understand very little but once I have a better foundation I am sure this will help understand them better and apply that knowledge on my own projects with my own twists. Same thing is done in Music Production. I used to teach friends by sharing my tracks with them and letting them see the whole process of the track. What Ryiah said in the above post also applies to my field, what you hear is not necessarily as simple as you may think or even if you’re a professional you may think I did it one way when it is totally different than what you will imagine. So looking at projects definitely sounds like a great tip.
In this case I suggest to go with “devour all information you find” route. It’ll take roughly a month, maybe a bit more till you get hang of the engine, if you haven’t used it before. That’s unless your game squarely fit into some existing template that happens to be covered in some sort of tutorial, of course.
(I just happen to have musical education)
If you asked me where to start to become a programmer, then my advice would be to:
Grab any language, preferably something simple.
Grab any book that covers basics of the language.
Work through the book.
Then find some project you find incredibly interesting, and work on it, looking up anything you don’t know in the process.
However, you want to use unity engine, and not just learn programming so things a bit different. First you can get away with having lower programming skills, compared to what you’d need if you wrote a game from scratch. The main difficulty would be getting grasp of the engine, its system and capabilities, and no matter what, getting solid idea of everything will take time.
That’s why I directed you to learning section. One decent way to get started with unity would be to start with some tutorial, then attempt to do something on your own (probably hit a wall in the problem), then try another tutorial, etc. Basically, tinker/play with the engine while using information you find in tutorias/documentaiton.
So in case of unity it would be something along the lines of:
Reference tutorials and documentation
Try to do something simple in the engine.
Have fun in the process (because it improves information retention).
Which is in the end would be similar to but not quite the same thing as “learning programming”.
Brilliant. Thanks for making it so simple. I wonder though… If I already learned how to program and learned how to use the engine. Do I need to know how to draw/animate? I know that a game doesn’t have to be considered a AAA title to have at least 20 people working on it because everyone has a task. I know that making cartoons back in the day required knowing how to draw and animate manually. Today there are a lot of tools which pretty much do the work for you but it is still a necessary skill in that trade. How about game design? Same? Also wondered about how much math and physics knowledge it requires a person to know. I see a lot of scary formulas in some tutorials and not sure if those people wrote them from scratch or used some “template”. I assume a lot of things have templates but if you have a certain vision which you couldn’t find a template for, it’s time to get your hands dirty. Just my guess at this moment.
I’m generally terrible in the artistic sense & fluked 2 times in calculus, but knowing the fundamentals definitely helps. E.g knowing that a vector is made up of magnitude and direction, will make sense when you’re translating/moving objects around, and even do simple animations via code. The hardcore part I’ll just leave it to the experts here (assets, google, etc).
Oh, you’ll be using math, but it’ll be a while before you really have to worry about it. Unity has a ton of shorthand for things, so you can focus on learning how to program well before you really need think about the fundamentals of what you’re doing.
So yeah, having some knowledge of linear algebra or whatever will certainly help, it’s not necessary. Hell, if we’re talkin’ music here, think of it like learning chord shapes: you don’t need to know what an interval is, but it’ll come in handy if you’re wanting to get fancy.
As for drawing and game design, those are skills like any other, no matter the decade. But not only is it okay for your first game(s!) to look ugly and not make a whole lotta sense, it’s about the only guarantee you have in this business.
I believe gang beasts uses rag doll physics and an upwards force is applied to the head to give the character a standing pose. If you Google unity gang beasts physics there is a YouTube video of someone doing just that.
If your new to unity then it might be a bit too much and going through the learn tutorials is definitely recommended.
That depends on your game. Drawing, animation and modeling are additional skills that require a LOT of time to get used to them. You MAY be able to use something off asset store. Unity does have systems for reusing animations between humanoid characters.
Math: Basica algebra + vector alebgra (addition, substraction). Dot product, cross product, sine cosine, this kind of thing. Nothing difficult.
Physics: Well… PhysX has most of your needs covered, but if you know basic formula for distance travelled under constantly accelerated motion (x1 = x0 + vt + at*t/2), that would be great.
Unless you try to do something like computing a volume of an arbitrary polygonal mesh, math is fairly simple.
Then I will keep in mind that once I get to a decent level in coding and design, I will get back to math, I would like to have the entire package. I am terrified by the idea of learning anything more than grade 9 or 10 math but I am sure it’s not that bad if you apply yourself.
Then I definitely need to get back to school for all the math related talk here. Kinda shocking but I promised myself I will do what it takes to shape myself into a proper game developer (hope I am using the right term here). I liked the music example you used. That last comment you made is true to most first games I saw people create. Thanks!
Yea I researched the hell out of Gang Beasts. I found that video as well but it was fairly difficult for me to comprehend what was happening on the screen. I could probably copy everything he does there but I would prefer to understand it first rather than jump ahead and get all confused. I wish there was more material on how they created those wobbly characters… So did they draw the characters ALL ON THEIR OWN? I can’t understand a lot of what he says cause he is not speaking clearly and the video is very quiet. I am going to watch it again later. In the description he mentioned that it’s not nearly close to being finished but at least he made something that gives us an idea how they created those ragdoll characters. Here is the video if anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ41w0eiKUk
To be honest, the Math and Drawing/Animating topics, stress the HELL out of me even more than coding but I think it’s an “irrational fear” just cause in Elementary School and High School I didn’t apply myself in those areas as I should have, doesn’t mean I actually cannot learn those skills. As a musician I should have the brain capacity to understand math and drawing/animating better than the average person most likely. our last line put my mind at ease though haha.
@iSoloGaming Yes thats the video I was thinking of. Rag dolls can be quite fun to play with but a little long winded to setup IMO which is what hes doing in the middle part of that tutorial. The actual code for what he’s doing wont be too bad at all. You could start with any rigidbody and move it around under keyboard control to get the swing of things.
Sorry I’ve not read the full post (bit busy) but from what I picked up on, obviously there is some maths in game programming depending on what you want to do and seeing forumlas etc will probably scare you a little if youre not used to that kind of thing but once you get gone through a few examples and played around a little you’l soon pick it up.
It sounds like you are a beginner, gang beasts looks simple on the outside but has a lot of complexity most games do not have.
Gang Beasts uses a lot of physics to drive the movement of the beasts and provide a mechanism for the combat.
Gang Beasts would be like programming a robotic humanoid to move and fight.
Most games use animation to simulate this and do not use physics to drive combat, look at any of the classic fighter games they all use animations and an artificial combat system to calculate damage.
Gang beasts is like Toribash (note the use of physics) but with multiple fighters and less limb removal.
If you are just starting look at the early combat games like IK for inspiration.
I think I will be jumping ahead of myself with this stuff. I really appreciate the follow up and additional feedback but I think this is really a bit much for me right now. Gonna take a step back and focus on what’s more reasonable for me.
Yea it sure does start looking this way. I can only imagine what a professional coder/developer feels when they see another beginner saying they want to build a certain game which tbh isn’t very realistic for 1 person as their first project. The last game you linked looks pretty cool. Thanks for the Toribash reference, helped a lot. I am gonna start a new thread which will be more focused on what I should be doing as a beginner rather than what I am fantasizing about (game dev wise hahaha) I remember when I just started Music Production… I actually jumped ahead of myself and accomplished what people can’t even imagine to accomplish within the first year. What I did for my first project, usually requires 2-3 years of experience, this is why I always jump ahead of myself, I don’t have barriers for my mind. But I think I should take it easy and take it step by step with this field, it seems a bit different than what I usually do. Gotta take the advice you guys are giving me.
